Google has started showing Direct answers to questions related to SEO. That has made me wonder how much someone could learn about SEO at Google with those direct answers, and I wanted to see what terms Google was showing results from and which sources. I expect there to possibly be a log of churn in the answers Google shows results from.

I started off by asking about SEO itself:

I then wanted to look at some topics that might have questionable answers and advice, and asked about the next three topics to see if SEO myths were being promoted by Google Direct Answer. It seemed like they are given the following three answers about Reciprocal links, Keyword Density, and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing):

Representatives from Google announced recently that they would no longer be updating their PageRank toolbar annotations for web pages. Google had been updating those 3-4 times a year for over a decade.

Does this news indicate that Google is no longer using PageRank, or that PageRank has changed in some significant way? (The ranking signal isn’t the toolbar annotation itself, which was too infrequently updated to be an accurate reflection of what PageRank might have been for a page)

We’ve been told that Google will no longer be updating this annotation or proxy for PageRank.

When I was in law school, I was a teaching assistant for an environmental law professor. One of the tasks he had me working upon was a review and analysis of electronic databases that could be used to assess natural resource damages when some environment harm took place, such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

How do you determine the cost of the spill to the environment, to wildlife, to people who live in the area, to people who rely upon the area for their jobs and welfare. In short, you look at things such as other decisions in other courts where such things may have been litigated.

At the time, the World Wide Web was still a year away, and many of these electronic databases we were looking at were very helpful sources of information. My task was to review those, and see how much value and help they might hold.

Google’s Pierre Far announced on his Google+ page that Google was releasing a new Panda update that supposedly included some new signals that could potentially help “identify low-quality content more precisely.”

The Google+ post also tells us that this change can help lead to a “greater diversity of high-quality small- and medium-sized sites ranking higher, which is nice.”

A new patent application shows off a quality scoring approach for content, based upon phrases. More on that patent filing below, but it might have something to do with this update.

I’m going to have to turn up the sound on my TV, and decide carefully what to watch, and test this. It would be very interesting if it works. Is Google clued in to what you are watching on TV? If so, is that through a set top box, or an internet enabled television?

If true, will this change the way that I do keyword research? Will it alter how I create content for the web, or decide upon page titles or meta descriptions? I’m not sure, but I am surprised.

The patent says that it might monitor what’s on TV in your area, and look for queries that might be related to that information. So, if someone searches for “Eagles” and there’s a documentary about the band, the “Eagles” playing on TV in your area, that’s a signal that may influence the search results you receive.

On August 1st, Jayson Demers published a post to Forbes titled Implied Links, Brand Mentions And The Future Of SEO Link Building which covers a lot of the same ground as Simon’s post. I contacted an editor at Forbes and stated that the post plagiarized Simon’s post. Jayson didn’t give me any credit for my post about the patent either, but Simon did.

Years ago, I started referring to search results as recommendations, seeing how they’ve been starting to look more and more like that part of a page at Amazon that says “people who viewed this book also looked at these books.”

When someone searches at a search engine, one of the things they look for in the search results they receive are trustworthy pages (or recommendations) that look (and are) legitimate. How does a search engine deliver pages that are trustworthy?

One way to do that might be to try to boost pages in search results that the search engine feels are more trustworthy – and Google developed a version of Trust Rank to do that with. The inventor of Google’s Trust Rank (which differs from the version that Yahoo invented) is Ramanathan Guha.